Digital Earth Africa provides a continental analysis-ready Earth observation data services. These services provide government, industry and researchers with valuable insights to help address social, environmental and economic change on the continent, develop an ecosystem for innovation and to address the challenges of sustainable development across sectors.
Digital Earth Africa's Services include:
The Coastline monitoring service helps users identify and analyse the patterns of past and present coastline change across the African continent. Environmental degradation of coastal areas in Africa has a great economic and social cost and is affecting livelihoods. The Coastlines service captures all 38 countries in Africa which have coastlines. With satellite imagery available for visualisation on the interactive map and several analysis ready notebooks available on the Sandbox, the Coastline service enables decision-makers across Africa to accurately assess their coastlines with consistent geospatial data for large areas.
Learn more about the Coastlines service.
For more detail view the product specification on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
Water Observations from Space (WOfS) is a continent-wide service that allows anyone to better understand water availability anywhere in Africa. WOfS allows users to understand the location and movement of inland and coastal water across the African continent.
It shows the presence and absence of water, and can be used to assess the change in water extent over time. This allows users across Africa to map, assess, visualise, and manage water resources and understand trends.
Learn more about the Water Observations from Space service.
For more detail view the product details on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
A provisional Cropland Extent Map service is now available on the Digital Earth Africa Map. It currently has coverage of areas in eastern, western and northern Africa with development of the remaining regions underway.
The cropland extent maps determine the presence or absence of crop. This information is fundamental to developing more complex agricultural products and empowers governments to understand their country’s food supply and inform decisions on a country's food security.
Consistent access to sufficient food is one of the biggest challenges facing the African continent. 33.8 million people are living with acute food insecurity in East Africa alone.
Learn more about the Cropland Extent Map.
For more detail view the product specification on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
GeoMAD
GeoMAD is a rich data service that condenses an entire year’s worth of satellite viewing into a single cloud-free, statistically significant composite (Annual GeoMAD). A provisional semi-annual GeoMAD service is also available for Sentinel-2 data, based on a six-month time period.
GeoMAD data can be used to inform decision making on crucial sustainability issues such as water resourcing, flooding, coastal erosion, land degradation, food security and urbanisation, and is particularly useful for visualising change over time.
Learn more about the GeoMAD services. View the full product specification on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
Fractional Cover
Fractional Cover is a service that describes the landscape by classifying the ground cover as bare, green and non-green. This enables analysis of environmental condition over time. The service uses Landsat 2 Surface Reflection therefore analyses can explore decades of change (back to 1980s to current day). This provides powerful insights into long-term annual as well as shorter term seasonal changes of vegetation on the Earths surface.
Fractional Cover can be used to analyse vegetation dynamics such as seasonal changes in agricultural and land practices, observe impacts of erosion and assess fuel load for estimating risk of fire.
Learn more about the Fractional Cover service, view analysis tools in the DE Africa Sandbox or view the full product specification on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
Mean NDVI and Anomalies
Digital Earth Africa’s Mean NDVI and Anomalies service provides a monthly estimate of vegetation health relative to the long term average conditions. This is determined by measuring how different the vegetation health is each month compared to the long-term mean for that month, measured in standard deviations. The service is designed to give users insight into how much the current vegetation conditions have changed relative to historic conditions. It can show improvement, maintenance or deterioration of the vegetation at each pixel across the continent.
The Mean NDVI and Anomalies can be used to analyse habitat and environmental conditions, seasonal changes, effects and risk of fire and the impact of a changing climate across a region.
Learn more about the Mean NDVI and Anomalies service.
View the full product specification on Digital Earth Africa Docs.
